If the question seems premature, that's because it is: we still don't know how the unrest that followed Iran's contested June 12 presidential election is going to end, let alone what moments will emerge, in retrospect, as decisive or catastrophic for either side.

But it's already being debated. Less than one week after the vote, a bevy of smart commentators was already trumpeting the allegedly pivotal role played, in the post-election power struggle, by social media in general and Twitter in particular.

Here, for example, is Atlantic senior editor Andrew Sullivan, who boarded the Iranian Twitter bandwagon early on, writing on his blog (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com): "I have to say my skepticism about this new medium has now disappeared. Without it, one wonders if all this could have happened." And here, striking a similarly exultant note, is new-media guru Clay Shirky: "This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media."

That developing consensus, in turn, quickly prompted a backlash in which the centrality of Twitter (and, to a lesser extent, Facebook and YouTube) was called into question. In a representative June 17 piece, Slate's Jack Shafer lamented the lack of hard facts conveyed through post-Iran-election tweeting, rounded up various critiques of the "Twitter Revolution" meme, and urged Twitter enthusiasts to consider these objections before panning him as a Luddite. ("If we should be able to criticize Ayatollah Ali Khamenei without fear of being shot," Shafer posited, "so, too, should we be able to scrutinize Twitter.")

Even if it's early to be pursuing this line of inquiry, here we are — and the answers just might offer some clues to the future of 21st-century media and politics. So what, if anything, can conclusively be said about Twitter's role in Iran?

New-media martyrIf she'd been slain five years ago, Neda Soltan — the 26-year-old Iranian woman apparently murdered by state security forces during a protest last Saturday — would likely have been subsumed into a broader, impersonal casualty count. Instead, amateur video of her gruesome death — posted on YouTube and disseminated by Twitter, even as the government rushed to curtail her family's right to mourn her — has made her an iconic symbol both of the Iranian protests and the ruling regime's moral bankruptcy.

Handheld combatA good way to start, it seems, would be to acknowledge that the phrase "Twitter Revolution" lumps together two subjects — Twitter's efficacy as a news-distribution tool, and its usefulness as an agent of political change — that ought to be considered separately. That said, one thing is certain: in a period when traditional journalists were either radically constrained in their reporting from Iran, or expelled altogether, Twitter played a crucial role in keeping the outside world informed about the crisis.

Mind you, if you tried to process this overwhelming stream of Twitter-driven information by yourself — say, by going to Twitter aggregator twitterfall.com and following #iranelection — there's a good chance you soon gave up in frustration. (I lasted about five minutes.) But if, instead, you let a smart, tireless journalist like the Huffington Post's Nico Pitney do the work for you — extracting meaningful new tweets from the virtual chaff, adding necessary context, and complementing all that with the best material from old-media sources — you discovered how compelling a reporting tool Twitter can be.

Safe sext Blogging, vlogging, and social-networking have already hit orange-alert levels on the oversharing meter. Now pushing things into the red are "sext messages."

Various artists | Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings Over the past year, Honest Jon's has released three compilations culled from more than 150,000 78s of early music from the EMI Hayes Archive: music from 1930s Baghdad, early West African music recorded in Britain, and a more general compilation that moved across country lines and the first half of the 20th century.

Deal or no deal? When the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe 's largest union, decided to take the New York Times Company's latest contract offer to its members last week, ratification seemed like a done deal.

Tiananmen 2.0? The presidential election stolen from Mir Hossein Mousavi was not really an election at all. It was a sham, an elaborate beauty contest produced by the Islamist theocracy that holds the real power in Iran. The mullahs pick the candidates and the outcome.

Of Twitter and Cassettes There has been plenty of breathless reporting on the goings-on in Iran. And rightly so. The protests surrounding the recent presidential election are historic — the heavy use of Twitter and social networking technology a breakthrough.

Beat the Tweet Warm weather is supposed to be accessorized by lackaday, by a breezy sensibility best enjoyed with a frosty tall boy in one hand, the sloppy product of a back-yard barbecue in the other. Instead, I find myself struggling to balance my beer between my knees and my overstocked paper plate on my thigh as I furiously poke at my BlackBerry.

BULLY FOR BU! | March 12, 2010 After six years at the Phoenix , I recently got my first pre-emptive libel threat. It came, most unexpectedly, from an investigative reporter. And beyond the fact that this struck me as a blatant attempt at intimidation, it demonstrated how tricky journalism's new, collaboration-driven future could be.

STOP THE QUINN-SANITY! | March 03, 2010 The year is still young, but when the time comes to look back at 2010's media lowlights, the embarrassing demise of Sally Quinn's Washington Post column, "The Party," will almost certainly rank near the top of the list.

RIGHT CLICK | February 19, 2010 Back in February 2007, a few months after a political neophyte named Deval Patrick cruised to victory in the Massachusetts governor's race with help from a political blog named Blue Mass Group (BMG) — which whipped up pro-Patrick sentiment while aggressively rebutting the governor-to-be's critics — I sized up a recent conservative entry in the local blogosphere.

RANSOM NOTES | February 12, 2010 While reporting from Afghanistan two years ago, David Rohde became, for the second time in his career, an unwilling participant rather than an observer. On October 29, 1995, Rohde had been arrested by Bosnian Serbs. And then in November 2008, Rohde and two Afghan colleagues were en route to an interview with a Taliban commander when they were kidnapped.

POOR RECEPTION | February 08, 2010 The right loves to rant against the "liberal-media elite," but there's one key media sector where the conservative id reigns supreme: talk radio.